DAME FASHION WINS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 967, 9 May 1930, Page 9

DAME FASHION WINS

SKIRTS SWEEP GROUND IN LONDON WOMEN’S VIOLENT PROTEST Reed. 1.30 p.m. LONDON, Thursday. Almost before London realised it, long sweeping skirts have returned and each day and night sees thousands more victims of the fashion. So seriously has the invasion, which is regarded as almost impossible, been taken that it was the subject of a debate at the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries thjs evening. Miss Ellen Wilkinsoil advocated skirts three inches below the knee and Lady Duff-Gordon six inches. The art critic, G. S. Sandilands, declared unequivocally for long skirts day and night, but received small support. Miss Wilkinson declared short skirts largely obliterated class differences, and she appealed to Ke power of the fashion dictators. The crinoline was just beyond the long skirts. “If they get us into long skirts, they will get us into corsets,” she said. She fervently appealed to business girls rigidly to resist them. Lady Duff-Gordon declared with emphasis amid great applause that the long skirt will never return. “Men will stop it,” she said. The girl who wears it is a fool.” A DEMONSTRATION Thus saying, she stood upon the table to exhibit her own short skirt. Sandilands urged that throughout the whole of his experience in art the long skirt had triumphed. “I am not an advocate of short skirts, but of trousers,” he said. He was howled down by the audience, which unanimously declared not to wear long skirts. Meanwhile the Men’s Dress Reform League, in which Dean Inge is prominent, declares that the women had let them down. "Last year we were hold ing her up as a model of good sense to misguided men,” it says. “They are now behaving like a poor fool man, and trail their disgusting dresses on the floor, and then return to the nursery to kiss the children, carrying millions of disease germs. Nevertheless dress reformers are getting ready for the summer campaign.”